Why Spy?

There came a day in the life of Joseph D. Duffey, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts, when he suddenly said, "No more" One hundred students were occupying a floor of one of his buildings on the Amherst campus. They were protesting the recent presence of two representatives of the Central Intelligence Agency. The spooks had conducted interviews with U Mass students who wanted to ask questions about working there. There are 10,000 such interviews of graduating college students conducted every year by the CIA. We don't know how many people are hired and won't know unless one more Marine sleeps with one more K.G.B. agent and slips her the combination to the safe that harbors those figures; the CIA is a secret organization. No one is disputing that. But at U Mass, the question before the house was, really, Why spy?

In any event, you must understand about Joe Duffey. He was once an ordained minister. He left his church years ago to labor in more worldly vineyards. He has taught at Harvard's Kennedy School and at Yale; he has served with the American Association of University Professors and the Department of State; he has been chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities; he has run for (continued on page 148)Why Spy?(continued from page 105) Senator from Connecticut and was for a term national chairman of Americans for Democratic Action. No man since Morris Abram landed at Brandeis University in 1968 as president has had a more pronounced career as a liberal activist--but this was the man who called the cops.

When 40 or 50 cops, dressed to endure the kind of punishment students on the march can mete out, began dragging out the trespassers, little did they know what they were initiating. Some of the students struggled to free themselves; some went limp; others preferred the tumescent body posture that requires police escorts to handle them as they would a coffin. As they were being stuffed into the buses, a 19-year-old sophomore was standing by, watching, dressed in her Army fatigue jacket, on the prowl for peace and justice.

The lightning was friendly that day: Amy Carter and her two companions were struck by opportunity. They promptly lay down on the road, preventing the police buses from moving. The obstructers were in due course shoveled up by the police, added to the live cargo in the rear and driven off to jail. There, the 60 who had occupied the building were arraigned, charged with trespassing (the lesser of available charges: They could have been charged with attempts to violate civil rights). Amy and her friends were charged with disorderly conduct (they could have been charged with obstructing justice). Both charges being misdemeanors, the defendants were permitted to leave the police office without bail. A crowd of 100 cheered those who were now "The Defendants." The Defendants vs. The Plaintiffs--the military-industrial complex' spy division.

When students do that kind of thing, college officials usually don't get around to pressing charges. But Joe Duffey saw himself here defending the civil rights of other students, including their right to hear CIA representatives. And so, suddenly it was whispered about: There would be a trial!

Why not--the defendants reacted--make it a show trial? A tremendous idea! Instead of a trial documenting misdemeanors by students engaged in occupying public quarters in a university building, and of other students obstructing policemen in the discharge of their duties, the whole thing would be transmogrified into the trial of the CIA. Oh my, it was beautiful!

The defendants got Leonard Weinglass as chief counsel. He was the man who had defended the seven people charged by the fascists in Chicago, after the Democratic Convention of 1968, with having conspired against the civil rights of those gathered to nominate somebody, for God's sake, to oppose Richard Nixon for President....Yes, the same great Weinglass who had successfully defended the Chicago Seven agreed to take on the defense of Amy Carter and her compatriots. And--it was becoming too good to be true--it just happened that among the arraigned protesters was Abbie Hoffman, and do you know where Abbie Hoffman was 19 years ago? He was one of the Chicago Seven!

The protesters would now need a defense committee to raise funds, and a lot of publicity.

And they would need expert witnesses.

Expert witnesses to prove what? Nobody denied that some of the defendants had seized a public building and that the others had obstructed the police in the performance of their duties. No--all that would be stipulated. The defendants would argue their innocence under the Massachusetts law called the necessity defense. That, in a paraphrase of the judge's instructions to the jury published in The New York Times, is "a tenet of Massachusetts case law that exonerates people who commit crimes if they reasonably believe that their actions will prevent other crimes that pose the 'clear and immediate threat' of greater harm." By interdicting any intercourse between CIA personnel and students at the University of Massachusetts, the defendants would abort efforts by an organization presumptively engaged in murder, torture, arson and rape to fertilize the aggressive eggs that he in the dark areas of the human brain even of students who attend the University of Massachusetts. Thus, students were being saved from lives of aggressive debauchery. The court would be convinced that Amy et al. had been guilty of crossing a red light but only in order to prevent a busload of school children from driving off the cliff.

The judge was asked, by motion of the prosecutor, Diane Fernald, to deny the "experts" summoned by the defense any access to the witness stand. What does their testimony about the CIA have to do with the questions before the house? she asked. All that the state of Massachusetts is contending is that these defendants seized a public building and deprived other students of their rights. We are not here, the prosecutor said, in effect, to try the CIA, or the FBI, or the Hitler-Stalin Pact, or the Donation of Constantine; we are here to ask punishment for these people who broke the law.

But Judge Richard F. Connon must have thought it would be much more interesting to have a show trial. Perhaps he had in mind the war-crimes trials of Bertrand Russell, at which the President of the United States and its admirals and generalsè in absentia, were the defendants, and witness after witness from North Vietnam would come into Lord Russell's courtroom in Stockholm and dilate on the criminal atrocities of the United States in Indochina, so distracting to the North Vietnamese, who were engaged in sowing paradise on earth.

Judges don't often get a chance to take part in great human parades, a chance to feel the exhilaration of sleeves-rolled-up political roistering. Mostly, judges sit; sit all day, listening to long-winded arguments from Philadelphia lawyers having to do with how hairs are logically and constitutionally split. This judge could instead sit back and listen to Where Are They Now?, starring Daniel Ellsberg! Then listen to Edgar Chamorro (who in the hell is Edgar Chamorro? Never mind. If the defendants want to bring him in, he will be interesting). Listen to Ralph McGehee. (Ralph who? Again, never mind: His testimony is sure to be dramatic.)

Judge Connon ruled for the defense. Let the "experts" on the CIA be heard in this trial on disorderly conduct and trespassing by students at Amherst, Massachusetts.

And so the jurors listened to Ellsberg, who 16 years ago gave the classified Pentagon papers to the press and has ever since dwelled happily in the fever swamps where, at night in the gloaming, the witches gather to tell the children about the atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam. And listened to Chamorro, once a Jesuit priest, now a foot-loose Nicaraguan who testified that he had been recruited by the CIA and told to teach the Contras how to practice butchery against the Sandinistas--never mind that these same Sandinistas were merely trying to do something for their people, among other things relieving them of the burdens of due process, private property and free speech. And listened to McGehee, who feels so aggrieved against the CIA, for which he worked for 25 years (why so long? Slow learner?), that he spends much of his time now elaborating his case against it, which case is consolidated in his book Deadly Deceits, the kind of deceits Amy and Abbie Hoffman and, your Honor, everyone who believes in freedom and decency, the Bill of Rights and international law opposes.

The jury deliberated for three hours and found the defendants Not Guilty. Amy called home and told reporters her father was proud of her and proud of the verdict.

The headlines! The headlines! "CIA, Not Protesters / Found Guilty by Mass. Court."If the doctrine of necessity defense applied in Virginia, presumably no one obstructing passage into CIA headquarters in Langley could be prosecuted. So the doors of the CIA would close, the verdict of Abbie Hoffman and Amy Carter. The jubilant defendants announced an anti-CIA march on Washington to be held ten days later.

There was a slight pause in the jubilation when Amy told a Washington Post reporter that she got most of her news from Oprah Winfrey's television talk show....

•

Early last spring, many weeks were given over to spy scandals, a fitting prelude to the months subsequently spent trying to spy out what on earth was going on in Reagan's White House during 1985-1986. First it transpired--in the colorful summary of Congressman Dick Armey--that our brand-new embassy in Moscow was "nothing but an eight-story microphone plugged into the Politburo." The reaction was sensational. Senators voted by an overwhelming margin (70-30) their conviction that Secretary of State George Shultz should, in protest, postpone his visit to Moscow, where he was scheduled to meet with his counterpart to discuss a new disarmament treaty unless security was assured. The question actually arose: Where in Moscow might Shultz meet to discuss confidentially with his advisors and aides the day's developments and to plan the next day's strategies? Normally, when in search of maximum security abroad, U.S. diplomats retire to "the bubble"--a kind of electronic bunker witèin which, it has generally been supposed, not even your guardian angel can overhear you. Well, it turned out that our bubble in Moscow had been successfully bugged.

Now, that which is bugged does not get debugged merely by the switch of a sweeper's wand (the estimated cost of debugging the new embassy has been put at $40,000,000). The bubble not being secure, it was suggested by some officials that the Secretary of State take to Moscow his own traveling van, presumably something on the order of what CBS News trots out when there is a location story to be covered. But then such vans were pronounced unsafe by an expert, who said they could easily be made to irradiate the sounds even of whisperers within. For a while it was thought that perhaps the Secretary should retreat every evening to his Air Force jet and use it as an office; but the unspoken consensus was that this would not be dignified. I volunteered the suggestion that staff meetings be held in a helicopter a couple of thousand feet over Moscow, but no one took it seriously.

As we all know, the Secretary did go to Moscow, and some kind of contrivance was jury-rigged to attempt to secure one meeting room. We do not know whether security was achieved. I remember as a boy listening to the Metropolitan Opera over the radio one Saturday afternoon and hearing the narrator, during one of the intermissions, dwell on a question that had been sent in by someone listening in to the Saturday-afternoon series from Chicago. He wanted to know, "Who hears the opening strains of the Tannhäuser overture first--the people sitting in the balcony of the Met, looking down on the stage, or me, in my living room in Chicago?" The question had been turned over to the technical experts, and now their verdict was in. Given the speed of sound (1130 feet per second), contrasted with the speed of light (186,282 miles per second), the guy in Chicago heard them first. I found myself wondering whether Secretary Shultz, addressing arms-control advisor Paul Nitze across a ten-foot table, was heard first by Nitze and only after that by the K.G.B.; or first by the K.G.B. and then by Nitze. Meanwhile, it was widely reported that our diplomats throughout East Europe and the Soviet Union had been reduced to communicating with one another by handwritten notes and with chalk on children's blackboards. With denuclearization comes the return of the palimpsest.

And it was revealed that two United States Marines had been accused of reciprocating a Russian woman's glasnost with their own opening: of the embassy doors. Never mind that, subsequently, some of the charges against them proved too shaky to justify presentation. (Indeed, all charges against Corporal Arnold Bracy were dismissed last June.) We were not told what they might have found in the embassy; there was talk of precious secrets.... The key answers to policy questions, for instance (What would be our fallback position if at the bargaining table the Soviet Union said, "XYZ intermediate-range missiles and not one more"?), but also a lot of other material.

The embassy in Moscow is not the major repository of United States secrets; but at this point those following the spy saga wondered whether there was any repository of United States secrets to which the Soviet Union hadn't achieved access in recent times, perhaps with the help of Toshiba, Inc. Since 1984, The New York Times reported, "at least" 26 people had been convicted of spying. Among them were spies whose findings caused losses that "reached monumental proportions." An estimated billions of dollars would be required to compensate for the damage.

And we don't know how to put a dollar figure on the damage done at another level. There are, within the borders of the Soviet bloc, a few men and women who struggle against their tyrants by covertly helping the Western alliance, even as what we called the Resistance struggled against the Nazis 45 years ago. How many of them were fingered as "assets" of the United States by these spies?R.I.P.

But in what seemed a matter of hours, it was all pretty much forgotten. Shultz went over to Moscow, delivered a ritual scolding to foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, protesting the aggressive spying of the K.G.B. within our embassy, and straightaway got down to the business of disarmament. The furor in Washington eased away, as it always has. In the past few years, more than a dozen Congressional committees, Government agencies and special advisory panels have published reports detailing the continuous vulnerability of America to spying.

No one is more receptive to the need to do something about it than Ronald Reagan, whose interest in subversive activity dates back to experiences in Hollywood. But--well--somehow, nothing very much gets done about it. After hearing a long report by the State Department, one Representative, a member of the Congressional subcommittee conducting the security investigation, burst out: "You've acted with gross negligence, with gross ineptitude, with gross stupidity. You're playing with people's lives." The State Department official simply stared at the floor. Through the general static we learned that when, on the prodding of his National Security Council, Reagan had resolved to give orders to send home 80 Soviet spies posing as UN diplomats, he was asked by Secretary Shultz, couldn't he please postpone such an action, which might upset pending negotiations with the Soviet Union? (Answer: No--Reagan issued the orders.) It is widely acknowledged that the organic impulse of the diplomatic mind is to belittle spying and, accordingly, to regard the paraphernalia of counterintelligence (Marines, bubbles, safes, polygraphs) as somewhat abrasive impediments to the search for diplomatic conviviality, the green pastures of the Foreign Service.

•

I set out, ten years ago, to write an espionage novel. That I had, soon after graduating from college, spent nine months as a deep-cover agent for the CIA didn't equip me to write anything other than about the training of deep-cover agents (they know nothing about the internal life of the CIA). No, I had only one special insight. It was that I would accept as axiomatic that the struggle for the world between the Soviet Union on the one side and the Western democracies on the other--for all the complications in holding any person or any state entirely blameworthy, the other entirely blameless--would in my novel depict a struggle between all that is hopeless and all that is hopeful. To make the case for the West does not require one to ignore the existence in America of poverty, race discrimination, a high crime rate, alcoholism, drug consumption or pornography. To make the case for the CIA does not require one to assume that the CIA has never committed, or sanctioned, acts that we would deplore.

But intelligence and counterintelligence, espionage and counterespionage are not activities subject to Euclidean legal specification, and this point is most easily communicated by illustration:

Is it right, or is it wrong, to assassinate the chief of a state with which we are not at war?

It is wrong.

Is it right, or is it wrong, to risk an event that might trigger a nuclear war?

It is wrong.

What happens when you cannot abide by the second rule, save by violating the first?

Give me an example.

Ok. A CIA agent reports that Colonel Idi Amin has got himself a nuclear bomb and that he plans to dispatch it at midnight, on a low-flying bomber, and to drop it on Jerusalem. That agent also reports that, at the crucial moment, at the airport, he can fix the cross hairs of his rifle on the head of Colonel Amin. Question: Does Washington tell him to pull the trigger?

If the question were put to a President Winston Churchill, my guess is that he would say two things: (1) Fire. (2) Don't ever ask me to write a rulebook about when you may and when yèu may not order the assassination of the head of a state with which you are not at war.

The easiest way to handle the problem of covert action is to say, "Don't do it." George Kennan takes the position that covert action, if there is the risk that it will not succeed in staying covert, is better off not being undertaken in the first instance; and that point is seductive. Especially in the shadow of the incredible Iran arms deal. The problem with it is that it fails to account comprehensively for the immediate good that can be done by covert action, even if subsequently uncovered. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., tries to put it all in the subjunctive mood by introducing his postulate with the qualifier "One may begin to wonder whether"--one may begin to wonder whether what?--"the troubles [intelligence agencies] cause are not greater than the benefits they bring." One may begin to wonder, except perhaps when sitting in that Pan Am plane and seeing two hijackers led off by the police. Or when one receives word from an intelligence agency, as John F. Kennedy did (with Schlesinger right there in the White House), that one half of the nuclear resources of the Soviet Union had been transported to Cuba and would be ready to fire in ten days. Would we not have been safer if we had known of it two weeks--a month? Two months?--earlier: Known about this cosmic development through alert spying within the Soviet Union?

It is very hard for many Americans to remember that the safety of the republic depends on our knowledge of two things. The first, the knowledge of Soviet capabilities, is comparatively easy to establish--though this, to be sure, is not accomplished without the spying regularly done by our satellite surveillance system. We used to call such creatures Peeping Toms. And in the U-2 phase of our Peeping Toms, we even denied (President Eisenhower simply lied about it) that we were engaged in monitoring Soviet skies. That episode, in 1960, disrupted a summit conference in Paris, and Ike promised Khrushchev he wouldn't do it again. But, in effect, his fingers were crossed. He had been told--by the CIA--that the U-2s were no longer necessary over the Soviet Union, that our new satellites could do the same job at no risk. But the U-2s continued to do valuable service. It was they that discovered the Soviet missiles in Cuba and, conceivably, aborted a nuclear war.

We have resourceful means of ascertaining Soviet capabilities, and the bipartisan emphasis recently placed on verification as a part of any disarmament treaty underlies the importance we attached to a sure knowledge of Soviet capabilities.

But having established that the Soviet Union has the capability of killing about 150,000,000 Americans in a half hour, what then do we want to know? The answer to that, of course, is, We want to know about Soviet intentions. We haven't yet figured out a way for the CIA to administer a truth drug to Gorbachev, but if we could do so and learn exactly what his intentions are, would Amy object?

The importance of spying is manifest. So are the risks. And those risks are magnified by the differences between the culture of darkness, the culture of the totalitarian state, and that of the free state. A Pentagon report in 1985 concluded that spying is so easy for employees of most military-contracting companies that "a supermarket employee may encounter far more difficulty stealing a loaf of bread." The consequences of such indifference to spying are as heavy as the Soviet Union's developing and exploding an atomic bomb in 1949, by reason of its own spying and that committed on its behalf by American and British scientists. That by nature we incline toward defenselessness doesn't mean that we should be complacently defenseless. "Americans just can't get it through their heads that the Soviets will do anything to spy on us."

That was a recent comment by Admiral Stansfield Turner. He used to be head of the CIA, appointed to that position by Amy's dad.

"Why not make it a show trial? A tremendous idea! The trial of the CIA. Oh my, it was beautiful!"